Episode 004 – How Mind Mapping Helps Students with ADHD

Summary: Welcome to this week's episode of the Mind Mapping Show and in this episode you are going to discover how Mind Mapping can help any student with ADHD quickly harness their unique creativity, easily increase their concentration and rapidly improve their school results. Today's interview is with Michelle Raz who is an academic coach who used Mind Mapping to help students identify and use their own unique strength and talents with a focus on students with ADHD and people who have suffered brain trauma. It's a really interesting interview packed full of great practical tips and I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak to Michelle and find out how she uses the technique. As well as the focus on helping students with ADHD you'll also discover: How you can use Mind Mapping to easily improve your memory How you can use it to give you laser-like focus if you've got a butterfly mind. A step-by-step plan to help you use Mind Mapping so you can remember anything you want. And if you're a parent and you want one of your kids to understand how to use Mind Mapping, well, in this episode, we'll explore that as well. Episode Show Notes 02:46 - Michelle shares how she got into helping students with ADHD 05:11 - The similarities and differences between the challenges faced by ADHD students and Business Executives 06:05 - Applying Mind Mapping to student goals 08:27 - The importance of achieving early success when working with students 09:06 - Why the structure of Mind Mapping is not new to educators 09:45 - How Michelle discovered Mind Mapping and why it is great for her students 11:14 - How ADHD students use a Mind Map to manage their thoughts and goals 12:12 - Why her students prefer this approach to "traditional" methods 12:46 - How and why Michelle does the Mind Mapping for them…at first anyway 14:02 - The students' reaction to using a Mind Map 15:35 - The value of focusing on what the students can do 16:00 - Successfully using Mind Mapping with a Brain trauma injury 17:25 - How using this approach can help improve memory 18:24 - Why Michelle recommends software 19:12 - Why Mind Mapping works so well 20:15 - Why the same technique can be used by high performing executives AND struggling students 22:10 - Answering the question - "Software or Hand Drawn Mind Mapping?" 24:01 - Michelle's top 3 benefits of using the tool 25:07 - Using a Mind Map for planning 26:03 - How a college student with ADHD has raised his grade point average and exceeded his goals 28:07 - How using this tool has helped her daughter 28:58 - How to introduce your kids to using it 30:55 - The hidden benefit of kids using Mind Mapping 32:29 - Where to find out more about Michelle and her work In the interview, also Michelle mentioned a software called MindWerx but following a Google Search, it seems that MindWerx is a consultancy specialising in Mind Mapping and related ideas and they promote the software found at www.eMindMapping.com which we highly recommend. Michelle is extremely passionate about Mind Mapping as you will hear in the interview and in addition to this podcast you can also find out more about her suggestions for using Mind Mapping for ADHD